I’m admittedly something of a Google fanboy. I’ve got all of my email accounts (many self-hosted) set up through Gmail, I use Google Calendar and Google Contacts to sync to my phone and PC-based calendars and am mostly quite happy with these services. However, sometimes Google releases something that either makes you go “WTF?” (Wave, I’m looking at you), or they release something that makes you go…well…something much more colorfully worded that I won’t repeat here.

Falling into that latter category is Google Buzz, Google’s latest “threat” to social networking giants Facebook and Twitter. Does that Buzz word sound familiar? It should, as Yahoo launched Yahoo Buzz over a year ago (albeit it’s somewhat different, but still), and Buzz.com (apparently a social media aggregator that’s still in beta) has also been around for a while. Therefore, it’s easy to accuse Google of falling the “OMG ME TOO” bandwagon of trying to be a social media powerhouse. Sadly, if Google Buzz is any indication, they’ve failed miserably.

Why? Well first, there are the privacy concerns (which they have addressed to a point, but it’s still bothersome). According to sources I’ve read, Google Buzz can make your email address, the people you follow, their email address and so on entirely public…unless you uncheck some checkboxes in your Google Profile, both of which are neither easy to find nor intuitive to use. Makes one think it was purposely made to be difficult. Anyway, I’ve also read instances wherein the mobile version Buzz will show/upload people’s pictures without asking, which I also don’t like. These kind of things were enough to have me turn it off. But oh, there’s more.

Google Buzz is also buggy, slow and not very intuitive to use. I’ve used Buzz in three browsers, Opera, Google’s own Chrome and Firefox. In each one, Buzz took a long time to load items, reply to comments and so on. I also don’t like how it doesn’t show your stream in the order in which things arrived, but in some sort of arbitrary order of popularity.

Next, why do I NEED Google Buzz? The people I most want to connect with — girlfriend, close friends, etc — are already on Facebook and Twitter, or hell, are a freaking phone call or text away. Do I REALLY need another, separate social sphere to interact with people? Google Buzz is its own self-contained little world, and why that is I have no idea. Sure, it can take posts from your Twitter, but you can’t post TO Twitter. If you see someone else’s Tweet on Buzz, commenting on there puts the comment on Buzz, not Twitter, which again makes no sense.

Sure, both Twitter and Facebook have their own issues with privacy, usability (I swear, if Facebook changes their layout one more god damned time…) and so on, but they are far, far more ahead of the game than Google. Sure, you could say that’s because Buzz is a brand-new product, but I don’t buy it. The folks at Google aren’t dumb. They can see what works on these services and what doesn’t, take the best bits and make a viable competitor to the social networking titans.

However, what Google has chosen to do is nearly force you to use their separated, self-contained, confused, buggy and problematic service that doesn’t seem to offer much more than the big boys. Google is kind of surprising me. First, they confuse me with Wave (which I’ve not touched in a month), then they tick me off with Buzz. I’m glad they’re trying to do something to expand their product offerings, but Buzz is neither new enough, different enough or special enough to warrant my usage.

I turned Buzz off this morning, and set most of my Google Profile to private (since Buzz reminded me I had one, which I guess could be a positive). Overall, in my opinion Google needs to rethink what they want to do with Buzz, and try to revamp it into something different, fresh and viable. Either that or let it become one more forgettable Google “beta” that people will joke about for years to come.